


exul mater

by jatazak (jazztap)



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Exile as Ryder Sr, F/F, F/M, Interactive Fiction, Non-Linear Narrative, Ryder does colonialism, Sadwall as Lord Scourge, True Sith as squabbling Nords, space mages in ruins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-03 17:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15823284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazztap/pseuds/jatazak
Summary: You may keep their barbarian vicissitudes from the capitol, even halt depredation of the frontier.As the world is divided into evening and dawn, so we gave the wandering star two names, and it became divided.[A generator of short fictions via juxtaposition. ~3k words over 23 possible scenes, 8 illustrations, and 1 secret ending.]





	1. this work is externally hosted

**Author's Note:**

> [the] exile [my] mother  
> Eosphoros, fall out of order.
> 
> In the style of Ice-Bound Concordance, or maybe the unrestored KotOR II ending.

jazztap.github.io/exul-mater  
Chapters archived here represent partial excerpts.   
  



	2. death / the magician / the devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You may keep their barbarian vicissitudes from the capitol, even halt depredation of the frontier,  
> now that you have rank. How did you gain that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 0\. the wandering (the foreshadowing)  
>  _inside, i'm ... what you're doing, what you do_  
> 

By realigning alchemical theory, writing the fundaments of your rival's praxis.  
Outside your cohort, where power is already actual, they haven't noticed. Perhaps that's what you want.

#### No record

The revanchist Marshal's personal history is a subject of popular myth, which they seem to have memorized. Their plans are sublime nonetheless, simple matters of logistics and human weakness. Their gaze turns to the Vanguard, unlike their Senate-spy apprentice's.

Parabila's patience for existential threats neither tribal nor Remnant in origin is strictly limited. She will never let you bring it up. She diverts you endlessly, or purposefully.

#### The despair of the state

You would clarify the Order's project, which is not a war. Until their populaces become Imperial willingly, reason will be given to the tribal territories. Where the High King had given so-called law, now all will have voice. They will choose civilized representatives, as citizens might.

Jala gave you one still-standing reassurance. The Senate's favored Marshal, once condemned for turning upon the Order, serves again reborn. This mutual terror will subside, similarly, and the territory will raise its own legion.

#### Cut away what is not

As the world is divided into evening and dawn, so we gave the wandering star two names, and it became divided. They will know you by your faces, which are your kith and kin, as you are theirs in turn.

You bear your erythristic hue, bruise-blue where the skin thins.  
You bear your heavy eyebags in furrows beneath alopecic eyebrows.

* * *

You steal into the Academy archives, as if to destroy. Jala shows you his open palms. You divert him with academic questions. "What does the Vanguard hope to glean from the Remnant? Did the Marshal write down anything, before-?"

"You can ask that traitor all of this." No hint taken. "Still asking why your master died! You needed time to mourn, in accordance -"

"I had no sponsor and no citizenship, remember?" But he despairs to broach the engagement again. You see it on his face. "I made myself useful to your spymaster."

  


"The Order should have spared you strength. Instead your thoughts divide, and feed amongst themselves, until the most ruthless commands you."

"Civilization renews itself, but there are cycles. I can hasten the downstroke, prolong the upstroke - this intervention would proceed for eternity."

  


Mother secreted you away in the Imperium, care of her Disciple. Her enemies would not find you. He would replace you with Jala, anyway.

The Order inflicted a corrosion upon you. They banished your novice, obscurantist shields. They hid unmerciful truths, that sang to you. She recognizes their vitriol.

They prepared you for the enemy, not the excess complexity.

* * *

One foot in the Order, which could not see itself hollow,  
and one foot out, where its strain could not be exploited.

It is already ruins, for it has been observed.  
Rahel awaits Jala, knowing he must face the Vanguard.


	3. the lovers / the hanged woman / judgement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...now that you have rank. How did you gain that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. the weight of disaster (leprous)  
>  _lay them all to waste_  
> 

By consorting with the enemy to secure an asset, beneath their general's nose.  
The generals cannot deny your influence upon your rival apprentice, nor her influence upon you.

#### What we once were will be

Mother discards names like shed skin. Once an exile of the Order, she would lead it from the brink of destruction, and then abdicate. She married a guilty xenos under her Imperial name. She took his High King's throne to give her fallen Marshal, marking herself Lord Ansegdniss, meaning sacrifice.

But the Imperium did not take control, as she had imagined. And she lacked all patience for compromise. Hers was the least of all evils only by obliterating the rest.

#### Strange instantiation

"You know, savages aren't meant to be carved from marble." Her hand slips quickly from your too-heated grasp. She'd pass for Imperial - not that all citizens are pale.

"Did they tell you our hearts were cold, devoid of human feeling?" Idyll doesn't even blame you. "That if we created, it was only for practical purpose? I am sorry."

"But I know myself well enough to believe it. I have been kept in health by plunder. I have studied ruins made by our kind from others' lives."

#### Dreams of willful prodigies

When the last war was fought, its plan was sound. To cull civilization of its weaknesses via the Remnant engine, not burn it to ashes in orbital bombardment. Thus the revanchists were disgraced in Imperial politics.

The traitor Marshal used your mother up, and was betrayed in turn. Now Parabila hews them to the Senate's behest, per the will of her Order and yours. She does not use coercion, so much as the Marshal seems to think they are saving her from something.

* * *

Idyll sends you books of reagents and once a live scorpion; shavings of metal in vials, and cuttings from trees in the oxygen gardens. You make gifts of mechanisms: a useless box, a floating drone with ferrofluidic skin.

As the courtship proceeds, you arrange to exchange masters. Caelum's casque for Parabila's staff. You produce the helmet filled with ashes, and stop hearing from your handler a few days later. Mother would dispense with the Marshal soon after.

Idyll begins to make her excuses, perhaps uncomfortable near the Highest throne, or seeing you by your mother's side. Her antipathy for the Order outweighs these factors, of course. Your alliance holds.

 

Pain is weakness leaving the body. It should not have to go. I would have committed any atrocity to avoid this resonance in you.

I memorized the ligaments of my joints, so that I would know what had fallen out of place, or that I had taken out, to cripple my enemy. The danger is not in the single transgression, but in not knowing whether it was necessary.

 

It is in setting a precedent that is neither inevitable enough, nor unpalatable enough to disavow. The body-as-machine does not promise to keep working, as the body-as-life would. It is common, yet merits no faith.

When she made us shatter(ed by) the collapsing planet, a deep well in physical spacetime, our general knew then that to remain present, sensate, would be to die or be destroyed.

Traitor our marshal who broke her own master upon her duty, Betrayed and Betrayer who brought our general back to slaughter her own academy.

You memorized your mother's weaknesses while young.

* * *

"Seeking ourselves, we'd be as killers, or healers, Rahel!  
Which role should I have led, so you'd need not?"

Her child cups her face with graceful hands,  
certainly not claw-tipped.


	4. strength / the high priestess / the magician

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...now that you have rank. How did you gain that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2\. the killing hand (dream theater)  
>  _what controlled ... that caused this mourning?_  
> 

By denying the enemy their agent, at the same time faking your own death.  
She fell from the sky like a star. Shouldn't have let you on the transport shuttle, to be fair.

#### Assistants

These thoughts would harbor amongst the hairs on your scalp, your various interests individually piqued. These snakes order themselves, scaled like shiny black locks.

They had arisen first in the Academy's deep archives, in various sizes. Warning stole about your shoulders as you fed Curiosity. They saccaded swayingly across reams as your own eyes fell tired, and you dreamed of yet-greater devices, un-sated.

#### Thus unto tyrants

The apprentice of the High King's rebel successor would be an ideal approach vector. Idyll's first test was the rescue of a logistics drone, an essential catalogue of Imperial weaknesses.

The guards were foolishly loyal, and the live drone-binary was briefly resleeved in your hardware. Each of his instances was a shard of a vast distributed analysis, whose ensemble measures relied upon certain secrets known only to certain nodes. He would be discarded upon return.

#### Cut away what is not

As the world is divided into evening and dawn, so we gave the wandering star two names, and it became divided. They will know you by your faces, which are your kith and kin, as you are theirs in turn.

You bear your heavy eyebags in furrows beneath alopecic eyebrows.  
You bear your bleached irises, dead like suns in their sockets.

* * *

You trace the sulci and ridges of of her skull-line from behind her curse-mask, which is arachnid precisely where it is occluded by her turning away, and classically beautiful otherwise. Her eyes are perfectly kohl-lined.

You expect to palpitate either an auricle or an eye-socket, and thus discern whether the mask is the monster or the woman. You do not expect the gradient of intermediates, your perspective arbitrarily division-making as you move around her body.

  


The High King's eldest apprentice, your mother's lover, fell in the wake of the coup. He'd taken to regret too well, perhaps. He burned with abhorent martyrdom.

It is likely that your malaise inherits from your father. The ineptitude at rationalizing tragedy away. A writhing in the arrector pili beneath your skin.

  


Your lover holds you coiled as you waken late the morning of Council.

You feel that her shoulders are at the pelvic level. Her wrists articulate with the inner side of some longer, more raptorial limb-structure. You look up from her bulging, spindly mass to see her fiercest expression, frozen in stone.

You weigh schemes of statuary transport. It is vital that you arrive together. The corona around your head is hissing snakes.

* * *

One foot in the Order, which could not see itself hollow,  
and one foot out, where its strain could not be exploited.

Traitors who do not remake their kind will not survive.  
Caelum bends to Idyll's desire, which Rahel instructs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3\. wars (hurt)  
>  _my darling..._


End file.
